


The Road Not Taken … Yet

by nutmeag83



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Anathema learns to be her own person, Gen, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, breaking up, what to do after you avert the apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-05-31 13:03:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19426552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nutmeag83/pseuds/nutmeag83
Summary: Anathema has trouble settling after the end of the world doesn't happen. She realizes being a professional descendant meant she missed a few things while growing up. Now she has to decide what to do with the rest of her life.





	The Road Not Taken … Yet

**Author's Note:**

> I have been a fan of the book for years (like, it's tied for first place in my favorites book list), but Anathema's ending in the book always bothered me. She never seemed particularly interested in Newt except for his role in stopping the apocalypse. I had hoped the miniseries would update her ending, but all we got was Pepper commenting on the patriarchy ... So I've decided to give Anathema a new ending. Hopefully you think it's in character. I was mostly thinking of the TV version when I wrote this, but I think it could apply well enough to the book as well. 
> 
> This is my first foray into the Good Omens fic world, though I've been enjoying others' efforts for ages. However, this is not my first Neil Gaiman-related fic. I have a Sherlock fic set in the Neverwhere world. 
> 
> Not beta'd. Agnes didn't tell me I needed one. ;)

_She isn’t who she says she is._

Anathema blinked and squinted at the card in her hand. No, that wasn’t right. The words swam on the card.

_He isn’t right_ , it said now. But that wasn’t right either. She had every prophecy memorized; she knew was it was supposed to say. She rubbed her eyes and looked again.

“Anathema?” Newt asked, sitting at the ready in front of the military computers, waiting for Agnes’s pronouncement.

She couldn’t remember what the prophecy was supposed to say, so she looked at the card again and read the line out loud.

“Another deluded victim of the patriarchy,” she said, but it wasn’t her voice. She clenched her hands around the card, then noticed they weren’t her hands. They were smaller and a few shades darker. She looked up to ask Newt what was going on when she caught her reflection on a glass-fronted server cabinet. Pepper looked back at her, shaking her head in disappointment.

“Agnes didn’t want this for you,” her reflection said.

“But it was in the prophecy,” she argued back. It was her voice again.

The girl shrugged in her uncaring way. “Just because a prophecy says you’ll kiss doesn’t mean you have to _marry_ him. Decide for yourself.”

“But I’ve never had to before.”

“We all have to learn at some point.”

Anathema woke with a start. She hated waking from dreams. Even the pleasant ones threw her off during the transition from sleep.

It took her a moment to realize she was alone in bed and several more to realize why. Newt had gone back to London to visit his mother. He’d asked her to come with, but she’d balked. It was only a couple of weeks after the Apoca-wasn’t, as Newt had taken to calling it, and thus only a couple of weeks since they’d met. Far too soon to be meeting the parents.

Plus, she’d been hoping the time alone would help her decide what she was going to do now that her professional descendent duties were done. She didn’t _need_ to work, what with her family’s money, but she was so bored doing nothing. She hated this rudderless feeling. It was like when she was in school and the teacher had anounced a free write. Anathema had never known what to write for those. She needed parameters, a direction to tell her what to do.

“We have to learn at some point,” Pepper’s dream words reminded her. It was what she’d been telling herself since she’d decided to burn Agnes’s second book. But just because she knew what she wanted didn’t mean she knew how to go about getting it. Although she didn’t actually _know_ what she wanted. She just knew what she didn’t want. She didn’t want the rest of her life dictated to her. She didn’t want her family’s high expectations weighing on her shoulders. She wanted freedom, but beyond that, she had no clue.

And Newt, being a bit rudderless himself, had only enabled her to put off making decisions. Anathema sighed. Newt. Her single decision so far—aside from burning the book—had been to call him her boyfriend. There had been a thrill in it, in doing something not foretold hundreds of years before. Sure, there had been the prophecy about the sex, but as Pepper had pointed out in the dream, the prophecy said nothing about a relationship, just the physical act performed in a moment of confusion and fear. An act that, apart from some stress relief and a feeling of connection in a frightening time, she hadn’t been terribly into. She’d put it down to Newt’s own inexperience, and it was true that things had gotten better with practice, but they still were … not awesome.

She found that frustrating. Newt was so sweet and caring and willing to do whatever Anathema wanted, both in and out of bed, but that kind of made it worse. He was no better at making decisions than she was, but at least she had the excuse of having a bossy seer for an ancestor. But given that calling Newt her boyfriend had been her first post-apocalypse decision, she was reluctant to take it back.

She sighed and finally dragged herself out of bed. She’d promised she’d teach the Them about ley lines and go on a picnic, so she couldn’t laze around all day.

Pepper’s line about being a victim of the patriarchy played in Anathema’s head through her morning, only quieting when she became too busy explaining ley lines to the kids during their picnic lunch. After that, she took a turn on the British Inquisition torture device, which had her laughing more than she’d done since she was probably twelve. It hit her then that she hadn’t had a normal childhood. Oh, she’d been aware at the time, while she watched her schoolmates have parties and sleepovers while she was memorizing prophecies and learning about the occult, but it wasn’t something she’d thought about since becoming an adult. And she suddenly hated Agnes for taking that away from her. She hadn’t asked to be a professional descendent. It had just been expected.

They went and got ice cream after they’d each had a turn being tortured, and she explained about American ice cream flavors—and surely the reason they only had three flavors in Tadfield came from Adam affecting the world around him to be some idyllic 1950s version of a small town, because she was pretty sure other places had to have more than three flavors—but when the kids refuted her, she couldn’t argue back because she didn’t know for sure. Along with no childhood, she’d also never traveled anywhere besides to Tadfield—and that had been a job, not vacation.

The kids were confused how an American adult had seen so little of the world, and she gave up explaining it after a while, but the thought that she knew so little stuck with her the rest of the day. When she returned to the cottage, all her confused feelings and the things she’d been thinking about hit her at once, so she made a cup of tea and went to sit out in the back garden to have a think. About it all. Newt. Her life. What to do next.

She liked Tadfield. She loved Tadfield in fact, but she couldn’t help feeling that Adam’s own love for the place was influencing her. She’d seen it with the others in the village—those who had no reason to stay but did anyway. Those who helped keep it the idyllic place Adam wished it to be. She wondered if that would change now that Adam was a normal boy. Well, mostly. She could finally see his aura, but she could feel that he still had some magic—for lack of a better word—left in him. But he was conscious of it now, and mostly kept it tamped down.

Despite her love of the place, she thought it might be best to leave, to let Adam grow up as normal as possible. But where would she go? She balked at returning to California. She loved her mother, but she didn’t know what they’d do without an apocalypse to avert. Being the mother of an apocalypse averter meant her mom hadn’t grown up any more normal than Anathema had. They would be two confused people bumping around a huge house.

She couldn’t move in with Newt. He still lived with his mother. And really, the whole Newt thing bothered her the more she thought about it. It was silly to stay with him. She wasn’t particularly interested in him romantically or sexually, and he deserved better than that. So did she, to be honest. She could still move to London, though. It was a big city with lots of options, and it would be nice to remain friends with and see Newt on a regular basis. She _liked_ him. She just didn’t _like_ like him. He was funny and odd and saw the world in a different way. And he had no expectations of her or who she should be. She could relax with Newt. But still, he wouldn’t ever push her either, and she thought it might be good to be pushed, or at least nudged.

She remembered her conversation with the Them over ice cream. She had seen so little of the world, maybe she could start there. She liked learning, and she liked experiencing different ways of seeing the world. A thought niggled, and she planted it and let it grow as she went inside to do a little house work. She didn’t focus on it the rest of the day, just let it dig its roots in her brain.

After a good night’s sleep (alone! in a bed where she could spread and move as she pleased!), the seed had grown into a nice flowering bush. She picked a few of its flowers to see what they yielded, and then she smiled to herself.

Yes. That would do nicely.

***

When Newt returned the following day, she was ready, armed with reasons and two glasses of wine. Just because she’d made up her mind didn’t mean they should both be completely sober for this talk. It wouldn’t be easy.

Newt’s sweet smile was also knowing when he saw her standing in the kitchen, which put Anathema on her guard just a little. He wasn’t exactly versed in romantic relationships, so there was no way he could know what she had planned. Could he?

She waved him to a seat at the kitchen table, where a (store-bought) meal waited for them. “Sorry, I would’ve made something but …”

Newt just smiled fondly. “I’ve seen how that turns out. A bit like me and computers.”

Anathema shrugged. “Preventing an apocalypse kinda makes learning normal things difficult.” Knowing a good opening when she happened on one, she continued. “Actually … that’s something I wanted to talk to you about.” She settled in her chair opposite him and stared into her wine glass, hoping it would show her what she should say. She’d never had to break up with anyone before. “I don’t think–” No, that wasn’t it. She tried again. “The thing is–” No. “I’ve been thinking–”

This time it was Newt who interrupted her bumbling. “It’s alright, Anathema. I know.”

She jerked her head up, eyes wide. “You do?” His gaze was a little sad, but mostly he just looked guilty. Wait. What? What reason did Newt have to be guilty?

He fidgeted in his chair, moving his gaze to his still-empty plate. “I might have … umm, taken just a teensy glance at Agnes’s book before we burned it?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “How teensy are we talking here?”

Newt shrugged. “Oh, you know. Just a quick glance … in the middle of the night … with a torch, huddled in the broom cupboard? I might have accidentally, uh, read the whole thing?” He looked up with a slightly scared smile.

“You … accidentally read an entire book of prophecies.” Really, could she blame him? She might have suffered under the yoke of generations of expectation, but he’d been making his own decisions his own life. That had to be just as tiring.

“I didn’t mean to, I promise! I just thought, ‘Oh, Agnes steered us right when we picked random prophecies to read.’ So if I read only a single prophecy, it’d be the right one for me and then … I could know what to do next. So I opened it to a random page.”

“And?” Anathema prompted, when he paused.

“It was an entire page ranting on how kids these days make stupid decisions.”

“Wait. What?”

“Yeah, it turned out it wasn’t a book on prophecies. Well, it had some prophecies, but it was mostly just her yelling at me.”

“You?”

“Well, she knew I’d be the one reading it, that you wanted nothing to do with it. I did save a page that she said you needed to read for yourself, but otherwise, it seemed to be just for me.”

She cocked her head. “And?” Anathema wasn’t sure how to feel about this turn in events. It was pure Agnes, harping from the grave, just as she always had, but it not really being about prophecies was something new. She would parse her feelings after she heard the whole story.

“She told me to go visit Mum and to ask you to visit but that you’d say no. She told me to read the next morning’s paper front to back and that the answer to my questions would be there.”

“What questions?” He’d seemed so willing to just follow Anathema everywhere that she’d assumed he would just do whatever she told him to for the rest of his life. The idea that he was questioning things just like her made her feel not so alone.

“What to do with my life. What to do with you.” He shrugged. “It was nothing specific, just a vague ‘what now?’ You know?”

And boy did she. She nodded. “Did you find your answer in the paper?”

He lit up, and it was beautiful. She’d never seen him like that and was more than a little annoyed that it was Agnes who had done that to him. “I signed up for culinary school!”

“Wait. Really?”

He nodded eagerly. “I was thinking, what can I do without having to ever touch a computer? Pretty much everything requires it these days. Then I read an article about this culinary school offering a beginner half-day class on cooking. Mum was already smothering me, and I needed to get out of the house. It was that afternoon, so I called, and they had a spot left. I went, and it was so much fun! And there wasn’t even a single computer in the room, and I realized, ‘I can do this!’ I talked to the instructor, and the next thing I know, I’m enrolling for the next term of classes. I start next month.” He looked so proud of himself that she couldn’t stay annoyed. She didn’t want to be annoyed with him. She _liked_ him.

She smiled. “Good. I’m glad. Sooo … Agnes said something about me?”

“What?”

“You said you knew what I wanted to talk about when we first sat down. She prophesied the, well, the end of our relationship, I suppose?

His grin turned a little sad. “Yeah. She said what we had was never meant to last. That we had different roads to take.”

“And”—she couldn’t believe she was even going to ask this. She’d thought she was done with prophecies for Go– for Sa– for somebody’s sake—“What did she have to say about my road?”

Newt shrugged. “Not much. Just that it was far away. She said you’d already decided, and that you’d tell me when you were ready.” His face brightened. “We’re going to stay friends, though. You’re going to be my first daughter’s godmother.”

“I am?” She wasn’t exactly good with kids, the Them excepted. She’d never really been one herself and hadn’t had many friends growing up.

“A ‘colde aunt’ she called you. I think she meant cool?” He wore a frown of confusion. “Either that, or you’re moving to Antarctica. Regardless, she said you had a long journey ahead of you.”

“That sounds nice. And accurate.” She gave a frown of her own.

“You’re moving to Antarctica?”

“Ah, no. I was thinking Thailand. To start, at least.”

“Really?” Newt’s eyebrows rose.

She shrugged. “I missed so much while being a professional descendent. I can’t exactly go back to being a kid, so I thought I’d travel for a while instead. See the world. Learn new things.” She felt the thrill again that she’d been experiencing since she’d made her decision the day before. So many cultures to experience, people to meet, foods to taste. She’d promised Pepper detailed accounts of the different ice cream flavors available. Pepper had nodded and said she was glad Anathema was thinking clearly now. Cute kid. Odd, but cute.

Newt was quiet for a moment, then he smiled and put his hand on top of one of hers. “Yeah, I think that sounds like a good plan.”

Anathema smiled back. “Yeah. Me too.”

***

And it was a good plan. A day at a time, she learned to live for herself and make her own decisions.

She saw ten countries that first year traveling, staying at each place until she felt the need to move on. In between countries, she’d visit her mother, Newt, and the Them. The next year, she visited seven more countries. She started blogging about her travels and landed a writing gig with a travel magazine. She lost count of all the places she visited after that. Then, she started spending more time in England to fulfill her godmothering duties. She watched the Them grow and leave Tadfield. She spent a year in Puerto Rico with her cousins. She became lead editor of the travel magazine.

She learned, and she experienced, and she had fun. She never read the page Newt saved from Agnes’s second book. She didn’t need the witch’s seal of approval or anyone else’s. She was happy. She was free.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed reading my little Anathema story. Thanks for making it to the end!
> 
> Come yell at me on Tumbler [@vateacancameos](http://vateacancameos.tumblr.com/) or on Twitter at [@aerynmoon0](https://twitter.com/aerynmoon0).


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